Motivation Through Financial Rewards Essay

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“The one best way to increase work motivation for an organisation is through financial rewards”. Discuss.
Motivation according to Baron (1991) “is the internal process that activates, guide and maintain behaviours”. Many people would agree with this view as the way we behaviour is mainly due to the way we are motivated, for example if we are approached with the promise of a reward for completing a task than we focus our behaviour towards achieving that reward. Other authors such as Kanfer (1998) “feel that motivation is only about the free will element of behaviour…”.in other words she says that motivation has nothing to do with rewards; it’s our individual abilities that define motivation.Hergberg(1987) further explains this by defining motivation as “a function of growth from getting intrinsic rewards out of interesting and challenging work”.
Many people would agree that financial rewards are what drive people to be more motivated in work, for example you are more likely to do a task quicker if you are financially rewarded than someone who isn’t, however quicker doesn’t always mean good quality and this is demonstrated by miller who did a quiz on school boys with financial rewards and he quoted that “those trying to earn the reward made a lot more mistakes than those who weren’t” and this goes back to Barons point about behaviours as the introduction of a reward change the way the subjects approached the task as they were more focused on getting the reward than the task. This can also be a bad thing as the employees will become more reliant on the financial aspects of the job rather than the job itself which would lead to lack of job satisfaction.
According to motivation theorist there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is “used to refer to behaviours for which there is no apparent reward except the activity itself”. Extrinsic motivation is “used to refer to behaviours in which an...